Iron Fist Season 2 Review: Finally Good Enough to Watch on Netflix

I don't really know why I watched Iron Fist Season Two. The show's first run was too lethargic to be fairly described as a mess. It was an insufferable, aimless thing that was remarkably good at coming up with the worst possible way to fill hour-long episodes. Maybe that's why I decided to keep going—nowhere to go but up, you know? Then a funny thing happened. I wanted to see what happened next. And then I kept watching.

Iron Fist Season Two is kind of incredible in that the whole thing is an apology for Iron Fist Season One. The entire run feels like a checklist, addressing criticisms in order of severity, and saying, Hmmm, maybe you were on to something.

In the new season, Danny Rand (Finn Jones) is working overtime following the presumed death of Daredevil at the end of The Defenders, trying to pick up the late hero's vigilante slack. He's pushing himself too far and pushing others too far away, ignoring the advice of Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick), with whom he now shares a home and a relationship. He's therefore wholly unprepared for the arrival of Davos, a native of the mystical city of K'un-Lun who trained alongside Danny and believes himself to be the rightful owner of the Iron Fist. In a point not too far removed from critics who brought up Iron Fist's white savior origins, Davos thinks Danny is a tourist who has no right to the powers he wields, and arrives in New York in the middle of a slowly escalating gang war in order to prove it.

Putting aside the metatextual way the show seems to be in conversation with itself, the basic structure—or, more accurately, the fact that it seems to have one—already makes it a huge improvement. But when you look closer, you'll be surprised at how small many of this season's tweaks are. There was always a decent show here, just a poorly calibrated one. Finn Jones remains a vacuum in the lead role, but everyone around him is nudged in a direction that's more satisfying to watch. Colleen Wing, despite the early half of her story largely being in deference to Danny, begins to move closer to the center in smart ways. The Meachum siblings (Jessica Stroup and Tom Pelphrey), having realized all the ways being the offspring of a wealthy man with secret plans to assist in the murder of countless people has messed them the hell up, are coping in uniquely destructive ways. And Misty Knight (Simone Missick) drops in from Luke Cage to kick ass and take names.

If the first season was like a superhero show that wandered into a family drama, then the second season gets better by being a superhero show that wandered into a family drama. There's an intent to Season Two that was previously lacking. That said, it would serve you well to account for Netflix Stockholm Syndrome: spend enough time with the streaming service's long and indulgent dramas and the moment they clean up their act a bit they seem incredible. Netflix's business model is wholly dependent on removing all friction from the experience so you can binge away your time from one episode to the next. When a show is bad to the point that it makes this impossible, the removal of said obstacles feels like a relief. And that's not necessarily the sign of a good show, it's just what happens when a faulty part in a machine is replaced by a functional one.

Because there are still plenty of things about Iron Fist that aren't so great. It's still set in a cartoonish version of New York's Chinatown neighborhood that I would call Orientalist if it wasn't so barebones. One of its new villains, Mary Walker (played by Alice Eve) is plagued with a characterization of mental illness that is largely just used to push the plot along. Its fight scenes are no longer incomprehensible, but they aren't remarkable either. (There's a plainness to the whole enterprise that leaves you begging for something, anything, that you could call style.) And while the show moves along at a steady clip (thanks to a shorter, 10-episode season), if you were to pause partway through, like I did, to watch something else, you might have a difficult time remembering just what you've been watching. (Don't worry though, the characters will remind you all the time.)

However, if you stick it out for the entirety of Iron Fist Season Two, you'll see something that feels tremendously rare: a show that seems sincerely interested in addressing the criticism it received, and becoming better for it. That's rare in a world where the default stance is to double-down, and its commendable that a series with flaws as fundamental as Iron Fist's would commit to addressing them. There's still not enough there to recommend the show to a complete newcomer, but if you're already along for the ride, you might as well see how it ends. The machine is working as intended.